The number of D.C. police officers continues to plunge as local authorities face new challenges to hiring and retention, such as lucrative packages offered by federal law enforcement agencies luring away potential hires and others already on the force.
Meanwhile, the department is plugging its holes in staffing with overtime shifts, a drain on the city’s budget that during the past fiscal year topped $130 million.
While the pace of officers leaving the D.C. police department through retirement or resignation has slowed, officials said hiring still cannot keep up with such attrition. A department that had more than 4,000 police officers in 2013 shrank to 3,350 in 2023, a half-century low, and dropped to 3,144 as of Feb. 25, the latest numbers available.
Police staffing remains a challenge for local departments across the country, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. But the problem is particularly acute in the D.C. area, he said, as federal law enforcement agencies from the Supreme Court police to the U.S. Capitol and Park police rapidly expand.
“You have this hiring blitz going on where you have local jurisdictions competing with federal agencies,” said Wexler, whose group advises police agencies on best practices and is in the midst of surveying departments across the country on salary and hiring trends. “We have not seen this kind of competition in the market.”
Interim D.C. police chief Jeffery W. Carroll told D.C. Council members at a Feb. 25 hearing that the “slide in sworn staffing is a persistent problem” and that the agency trusted to police the nation’s capital now has 660 fewer officers than the year before the coronavirus pandemic. Police officials have repeatedly warned over the past several years that low staffing impacted everything from investigating crimes to patrolling neighborhoods; the mayor has cited lower crime during periods of high staffing.
Carroll told the council that attrition has outpaced hiring for seven consecutive years. In fiscal 2025, the department hired 162 police officers and lost 257; in the first four months of fiscal 2026, the agency hired 56 officers and lost 88, according to statistics police provided to the D.C. Council.
Local big city police departments across the country often compete with each other over salaries, benefits and perks, such as signing bonuses and take-home police cars. Officials say the pool of applicants is also dwindling because fewer people are interested in government service, where pay is lower and perks are fewer compared with the private sector, and the profession suffered a blow with the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the social justice protests that followed across the country.
Now, officials say, the Trump administration’s surge in hiring among federal policing agencies, including ones dealing with immigration, are presenting additional challenges to local hiring. U.S. Park Police are offering a $70,000 hiring bonus; ICE officers $50,000, double the signing bonus offered in D.C.
Suburban police departments, with lower crime rates, are also making it more difficult for D.C. Carroll said Arlington, Virginia, is increasing its starting pay from $72,000 to $90,000, the highest in the area, starting July 1. D.C. officers start at $75,400.
“It is increasingly difficult to compete against other jurisdictions and departments to recruit new members,” Carroll told D.C. Council members at the February hearing. He added that the competitors’ packages are “drawing not only recruits, but also MPD officers who resign.”
Carroll told the council that Arlington County offers a “better work life balance in a quieter jurisdiction” and “is a draw for some applicants.” A D.C. police spokesman said Carroll was not available for an interview for this article.
A spokeswoman for the Arlington County Police Department said it too has “continued to struggle with police staffing” and has averaged a 20 percent vacancy rate. Boosting the starting salary, the spokeswoman said in a statement, “makes smart investments focused on attracting highly qualified applicants to serve and protect the Arlington community.”
D.C. residents may not yet know the full impact of the department’s dwindling staff.
In 2023, when D.C. reported the half-century low in staffing, the city was in the midst of a crime wave with carjackings being committed at a record pace and homicides at a two-decade high. But now, crime is down to pre-pandemic lows, with sharp drops in homicides and robberies.
The number of police officers the District needs has been debated for years. In 2022, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said she wanted to have 4,000 officers by 2031. A report from the city’s independent auditor in 2024 concluded that D.C. police were sufficiently staffed in the patrol ranks and called for more civilians to push sworn members off desk jobs and onto the streets. The audit criticized the way the department tracked overtime and said a smaller force with a sharper focus on root causes of violence would help reduce crime.
Christy E. Lopez, who co-chaired D.C.’s police reform commission after Floyd’s killing, which called for a smaller department, said the argument “we have less [officers] than we had before, therefore we need more” is wrong.
Lopez, who helps run Georgetown Law’s Innovative Policing Program, said the District needs to adopt a more holistic model that can use professional mediators, mental health professionals and social workers to respond to some calls, and more strategically deploy the officers they do have.
D.C. police at the time dismissed the audit’s conclusions as “at odds with reality” and out of step with community demands. They said the auditors failed to grasp the unique nature of policing the nation’s capital, with numerous large-scale events, daily demonstrations and assisting with dignitaries who live in D.C. or visit the city. A police spokesman declined to comment on the audit beyond its initial statement.
President Donald Trump further complicated the debate over the department’s needs when he declared a crime emergency in D.C. in August, seizing temporary control of the city’s police, while sending federal agents and the National Guard to patrol neighborhoods. Bowser and police officials — while pushing back on immigration activity and noting that crime was already falling — credited the surge with helping lower crime, such as homicides and carjackings. She subsequently ordered indefinite coordination between the city and federal law enforcement officials.
Greggory Pemberton, chairman of the D.C. police union, warned council members at the February hearing that if the downward trend in staffing continues, the force could fall to fewer than 3,000 officers within a year. He noted that the department used 1.7 million hours of overtime in the past fiscal year, double that of the years from 2010 through 2020. Twenty-five police officers earned more than $200,000 in overtime last year, police records provided to the Council show. The top earner was a sergeant in the tactical division who pulled in $374,000 in overtime, in addition to his $138,000 annual salary, twice as much as the mayor takes home.
Pemberton told council members that the overtime use by the department is “unsustainable” and “is a major factor in officers retiring early or leaving for other agencies. … It is of the utmost importance that we are properly staffed to handle any emergency that may affect the city. We have handled everything from extended periods of civil unrest to pandemics, to aircraft collisions.”
Wexler, from the research forum, said police departments on the West Coast are also struggling to fill their ranks, even with starting salaries in the six figures. He said he believes few officers are transferring out of local departments into agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the competition for first-time applicants remains robust. He said local police departments on the West Coast are struggling to fill their ranks even with six-figure starting salaries.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Michael G. Sullivan said his department has been rapidly expanding the past few years, and now has 2,300 sworn officers, up from 1,830 in 2021 after the Capitol riot.
“We’re still several hundred short” of officers needed, Sullivan said in an interview. The starting salary is $86,530; the department does not offer bonuses but provides tuition reimbursements up to $80,000 for officers.
Sullivan said the force needs to be bolstered given the number of threats made against members of Congress, staff, their families and the Capitol complex itself. Capitol Police said the number of threats exceeded 14,000 in 2025, nearly double the number from 2022.
The chief said the department is filling each of its academy classes, but he cautioned the biggest challenge is retaining officers they do hire. Sullivan said the department reminds new hires that joining immigration authorities could lead to positions elsewhere in the country, while staying with Capitol police means “you can set up your family here for a full career.”
Dan Morse contributed to this report.
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